A plan to rebuild knowledge
Bacon concluded that only one course remained: to retest everything on a better plan, rebuild all sciences, arts and human knowledge from scratch, and set them on a sound foundation. Since he could not know when such ideas would occur to anyone else, he decided to publish whatever part he had finished, so that after his death he would at least leave a sketch of what he intended. Next to this design, every other ambition seemed small to him.
He presented the whole plan to James I and apologized for having stolen from the king's time the hours he spent on it, hoping that the result would make the king's name immortal and his age glorious, which in fact happened. James was a learned man of good will, and if he could have helped the plan financially, how much might have been achieved. Four centuries earlier, in 1268, Roger Bacon had dedicated his Opus Majus (the Persian calls it the great book) to Pope Clement IV and asked for help in advancing science. Now his namesake asked his own king, for the material and moral benefit of mankind, to organize scientific research and unify its results. He reminded James of the philosopher emperors (the Persian text says kings, and names a garbled first figure that is probably Nerva, then Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius), who for a century governed the Roman Empire well. One may ask whether Bacon's constant defense of the king, which led to his own ruin, came from his need for royal support.
In another preface he asks the reader to regard the learning of the time as full of error and shamefully stagnant, because for many centuries great minds were forced from their course. People of talent above the common level had to bow to the judgment of their time and of the crowd to protect their reputation, so that any noble thought was soon rendered fruitless by popular opinion. To placate the theologians, who dominated the minds of people and king, Bacon warned readers to confine the meaning of his work within his duty to heavenly matters. He said he did not intend to discuss any religious subject or doctrine, and added that what he offered was not an opinion to hold but a work to do. His aim was not to found a sect or a new principle, but to benefit mankind and increase its power. He invited others to join him and hoped later generations would carry on.
The six parts
In the announcement of the plan Bacon set out the program of this difficult labor. First, he would reclassify all existing or desirable sciences and mark out the problems and fields of each. He did this in The Advancement of Learning, which he translated into Latin for the information of Europe. Second, he would examine the defects of contemporary logic and find another way to make fuller use of the human mind itself, since in his view what Aristotle wrote on logic, collected as the Organon, was incomplete. He carried this out in the Novum Organum (1620). Third, he would write a natural history of all phenomena of the world, from geography and physics to biology. Fourth, he would give examples of scientific inquiry by his new method. Fifth, he would describe the findings he himself had made, under the title Forerunners. Sixth, he would describe how the philosophy emerging from such studies would develop and be accepted, though he said that completing the last part was beyond his powers and expectations.
We, who today flounder in an ocean of sciences and specialties, may think Bacon's aim sheer pride. But science then was not so vast and exact, and the importance of what he accomplished suggests that he must have touched everything. When he told Cecil that he took all knowledge as his province, he did not mean he knew every science in detail, but that he surveyed the sciences from a rock in order to organize and encourage them. William Harvey said Bacon wrote philosophy like a lord chancellor. That is true, and he drew his plan of philosophy like a magnificent commander.
What the Advancement of Learning asked for
In the Advancement of Learning we see the sharpness and breadth of his mind. He states his ideas with unusual modesty, saying they are no better than the noise musicians make while tuning their instruments, yet it is here that his own thoughts appear. He asks for more libraries, laboratories, botanical gardens (the Persian reads biological tissue collections) and museums of science and industry; higher pay for teachers and researchers; more money for scientific experiments; and better cooperation among the universities of Europe, each working in its own field. While worshipping science, he does not neglect other subjects. He defends a liberal and general education, including literature and philosophy, as the necessary means for wise judgment of aims and for accompanying scientific reform. He tries to classify the sciences logically, mark their fields and limits, and apply each to the puzzles that need research. Many of his wishes were fulfilled by later science: better recording of clinical notes, prolonging life through preventive medicine, careful examination of psychological phenomena, and improvement of social psychology. Bacon even foresaw that in our age there would be studies of the art of success.
The Novum Organum
The second and bolder part of the Great Instauration was an attempt to frame a new scientific method. Aristotle had accepted induction and sometimes approved its use, but the main feature of his logic was the axiomatic method, and its ideal was the syllogism. Bacon felt that the old logic, by stressing theory and neglecting scientific observation, had caused science to stagnate. His Novum Organum offered a new system and method of thought: the inductive study of nature through observation and experiment. Though unfinished and flawed, it is the most important philosophical work in England and the first clear call to the age of reason. Although written in Latin, its sentences are so clear and pithy that half of them count as aphorisms.
Its opening lines hold a compressed philosophy that announced the inductive revolution, foresaw the industrial revolution, and handed the key of experimental science to Hobbes, Locke, Mill and Spencer. Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, can act and understand only as far as he has observed nature's course by deed or thought; beyond that he knows nothing and can do nothing. Human knowledge and human power go together, for where the cause is unknown the effect cannot be produced. To command nature one must obey her.
Seventeen years later Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, proposed to begin philosophy by doubting everything. Bacon likewise made the first step of renewal the purification of the intellect. Human science as it now stands, he said, is a mixed and undigested heap, made of much credulity, chance, and the childish notions first planted in us. So from the start we must cleanse our minds, as far as we can, of unexamined assumptions, groundless likes and dislikes, guesses and theories. We must even stand apart from Plato and Aristotle. We must throw out the idols, meaning the illusions and fallacies that arise from the peculiarities of our own judgment or from the ancient beliefs of society, and avoid logical tricks and nonsense about vague ideas.
We must leave behind those deductive philosophical methods that aim to draw thousands of eternal conclusions from a few self-evident propositions and principles. In science there is no magician's hat: whatever we take out of the hat in our work, we must first put in by observation or experiment, and not only by casual observation and simple enumeration of facts, but by trial and experiment. So Bacon, who is accused of not knowing the true method of science, describes the true method of modern science. The true way of experiment first lights the candle (the hypothesis), then by the candle shows the way. It proceeds by a properly ordered experiment and draws from it axioms (provisional conclusions), and from the established axioms makes new experiments. Experiment alone must judge.